


my shining palace built upon the sand

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Sleepy Hollow (1999)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-19
Updated: 2006-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 04:20:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1631234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ichabod, Katrina, and Masbath beyond the picture frame in winter, untangling magic, love, sorrow, and justice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	my shining palace built upon the sand

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Kadorienne

 

 

my shining palace built upon the sand

*

Ichabod viciously swept his wineglass onto the flagstone floor. The wine stretched out in a long stain along the blue rag rug that his wife had brought from her girlhood bedroom. The glass shattered, the bowl fragmenting instantly while the stem snapped and lay broken as a bone, glittering.

Movement caught at the corner of his eye, and he looked up. Katrina's hair hung down her back in its thick heavy braid. She shivered, and Ichabod saw that she was barefoot. A stab of guilt assailed him-he's brought her from her bed. "Katrina..."

Standing, he gestured her into his chair, pulling it away from the broken stem of the glass. The shards caught the light as he moved, flashing and glittering. She only looked at him. Truly, that was enough. Even in ignorance of her name, a stranger in her father's house, he had been spellbound by the text of her face. He had no choice but to answer. "I am sorry for waking you, it was wrong of me to allow such a display of temper. I...oh, curse it." He bowed his head, fingers running nervously through his loose hair.

She moved to accept the offered seat, and Ichabod saw the boy Masbath standing quiet behind her, waiting, poised for action. He looked at the child as Katrina nestled in to the bentwood chair, meeting Masbath's dark serious gaze. He'd come with Katrina, watching over her. A quirk of Ichabod's mouth and the boy's face cleared, reassured enough for his practical nature to take over. Taking down a brush from one of the coat-pegs by the door, Masbath knelt on the stained rug. Picking up the pieces. An odd shame choked Ichabod's face as her watched the child working, careful not to cut his calloused hands.

When Katrina spoke, her words didn't break the silence; the one simply flowed into the other, swirling currents of speech and noiselessness spilling down to the floor. "Tell me what the trouble is."

He gestured wildly to the notes strewn about the worktable, his fingers derisive. "A case. There was a murder." He was up, pacing, energy running through him like an electric current, his mind racing like some metal animal driven by steam. At his feet, Masbath listened solemnly, watching his master and waiting for his opportunity to help.

Ichabod felt their eyes on him like garments of lead, the deep dark eyes of the girl and the child. "A young woman of sixteen, drowned in the river. Body quite waterlogged, so no hope of incriminating evidence. Cause of death determined to be drowning, therefore not previously murdered and dropped in the Hudson as a method of disposal." It flooded out of him-hours of anxious frustration and mental effort wasted, and beneath it all an awareness of the horror of little girls murdered in the river sleeping unavenged. "I cannot find the killer."

"But you will," Katrina said, so certain.

"I do not know how. I've tried everything that I know, and still nothing." The last word tore itself out of him, twisting in a shocking rage. Masbath flinched away, curling up on Katrina's dead mother's rag rug.

Katrina's nightgown rustled as she stood. She went to Ichabod , pausing as she passed to rest a hand on Masbath's spiky dark hair, small caresses that Ichabod knew meant everything. Taking him by the hand, she raised herself on tiptoe to brush a kiss against his temple. "Come to bed, dearest. You need to rest. The answer will come to you much easier in the morning."

Ichabod felt that he was falling into her, too many hours of wakefulness opening his mind to all manner of strange thoughts. Her eyes also caught the light, and her lips, and her bare clavicles. He followed her down the hall to their bedroom, and it was as long and dark as his endless litanies of guilt and detection. He was so tired; she was right. It could wait until the morning.

"Here, let me boil you an infusion. I'll not have you taking ill, exhausting yourself in such cold weather as this." Her small hand brushed the hair back from his bowed forehead, lithe and cold and sensate.

Somehow from one moment to the next Katrina's arms were wreathed in steam, sweet breath of chamomile and valerian to cover the bitter tang of coneflower in the dregs of the drought. He drank, and when he lay his head down her body was already between him and the pillows, cradling him warm and bright.

*

"Damn it, Crane! You're never anything but a thorn in the side of criminal justice, and you can't even prosecute the cases that the public trusts to you? What do you think the police force is, man? A charity organization?"

Meekly, Ichabod replied, "No, sir." All around him was the smell of iron: bars, grids, containers for housing those who fell afoul of the law. Some more painfully than others. Both fire and water ran through the jail, each useful in its own way for extracting confessions for the reluctant, and their noise carpeted the stone rooms with a constant rushing sound that drowned out any more specific sounds. He felt that he had to fight to even be heard. "However, in my defense I would wish to state that the possession of moral scruples and respect for scientific detection does in no way render a man inhuman, in that he is still fallible."

Billingsworth laughed in his face, his breath acrid and warm. Ichabod saw that one of his teeth was rotten, hanging at a loose angle. "Crane, you're not fallible. You've failed!" He chortled again. "You've not successfully prosecuted a single case since you got back from up-river. You may talk a good one, but you're no good at catching criminals. They're far too devious for a wilting flower like you t'understand."

He had to grovel, and he knew it. But Ichabod's bile rose at the thought of showing the red-faced constable anything but his disdain. "Sir, if you will only give me more time. These techniques are new, as yet untried but capable of great good once fully tested. Think of it this way," he added, biting back accusation. "We have not, in these past weeks that I have been at work, killed, mutilated, or tormented one man. Is that not in and of itself a gain?"

"Crane, I don't think you quite understand this job," Billingsworth sneered. "You're not in fact here to take care of the criminals. You're here to punish them. So don't spend so much time worrying about whether they sleep well at night, nursey-mine. And speaking of sleeping well, I hear you've a new missus about. A pretty, rich little thing, so it's said."

Ichabod's hands clenched involuntarily. He forced his voice to steady. "Sir, what do you mean in mentioning her?"

"Oh, nothing," the other man replied. "Just that you might want to watch out for your job, is all. Wives aren't easy to keep on the bounty of society, specially not pretty ones."

"My wife has nothing to do with this discussion," he spat. Oh, Katrina, his mind sang, I am sorry. I am sorry that low men such as this can speak your name, and I am sorry that what he says may well be true. I have put justice before you many times, and I will do so many times more. Can you forgive me? To Billingsworth he said, "This discussion includes only the assertion that it is better to let the law proceed slowly than to imprison or torture an innocent man. Have you never questioned those tortures? Would not a man so tormented say anything to end the pain, confess to anything? How many men have you hung on such testimony?"

"And if I have, what harm? They're low-lifes all, and the city's better without them. Crane, you let that heart keep bleeding and I'll have your job right off your back, I will."

*

"I could tell you who it was," Katrina said. "I know how much it's been bothering you." She didn't look at him, her eyes remain fixed on her needlepoint. Something for her trousseau, he though it was, some small fragment of white linen.

"Whoever do you mean, dearest?" he asked, more than half knowing the answer already.

"Your case. You can't find the murderer. I could look for him, I know the spells. And then it would be over, and you could rest."

He felt for a moment like a child as Time slipped through his fingers, superimposing the image of his mother on the face of his wife. Unguarded, trusting, he asked, "You could do that?"

Her needle flashed in and out, in and out. "I never have before," she admitted. "I've always stayed to the small magics; bits of healing, protections about the home, charms for happiness and health. You always have," she added with a smile, "pushed me beyond my limits. That sleeping potion that I made for you took all my strength. I had never tried anything so grand or complex before."

The rosy light of sunset drained away from the sitting room, replaced by that pale blue shadow of twilight. Where moments ago Katrina's face had been flushed and blushing, it was now dark and hollow, full of secret angles where the light from the lamp did not strike. The sun had set. She looked every bit a witch, and Ichabod wanted nothing more than to draw away from her, to expel her from his house and heart and mind. A spasm of fear passed over his face, twisting it. And she saw it, and understood, but said nothing.

She leaned over and turned up the lamp wick, and the room was bright and golden again, and he was ashamed. He was too quickly influenced. A mere change in the light had nearly made him hate his wife. How could he think himself a strong or a righteous man, if superstitions found such an easy grasp in his heart as that? 'I am sorry," he said aloud. She nodded, assenting to the words he had left unspoken, the ones that explained why.

He stood up. He felt more a man on his feet, more in control of the reins of his destiny. Trying to warm his extremities, he paced about. Something in his ribcage was restless, struggling to get out. "I could not convict a man on such evidence," he said, attempting to keep it at bay with words, with logic, to stuff them in the corners and strengthen the walls. "My argument all along has been that facts must provide the basis for an arrest. Can I now put aside those principles and jail a man on the word of a witch?"

She looked up at him, and something in her eyes had closed, slid shut to leave them opaque and impenetrable. At last, she said, "It's late. We should go to bed." Without waiting for his answer, she stood and moved noiselessly away, the light of her candle floating behind her.

He let his head fall into his hands. He had gone too far, and had lost her, and still the murderer was not found.

*

On reflection, he decided that winter had not been the best time of season to bring Katrina to New York. It was a particularly cold one, and for the most part she was confined to their rooms. Snow-frolics like the ones she told him of from her girlhood had no place in cobblestone streets, and at any rate she had no real companions to join in the drifting flakes.

It bothered him. There was, he reflected, this difference between them: for all his idealism, he had been able to keep a cardinal in a cage, as she could not. He wondered if his little red bird had ever made it to better country, or if it had starved after he tossed it out into the stony city. It was a maudlin thought, but Katrina's face had been drawing all of his melancholy to the surface of late.

Ichabod had married Katrina within weeks of their return from Sleepy Hollow. As she said it, she had no one in the world but him, and there was no sense in waiting. She had balked at his attempts to install her in a hotel-"I came to this city because of you, Ichabod Crane. Why then should I leave you?"-and so had been living in his quarters. Swift marriage was the only action that he could take to protect her name from scandal.

He still couldn't really believe that she was his.

It had been a small wedding-just the two of them, and the boy Masbath for witness. Katrina had worn the pale gold frock he'd first seen her in, first kissed her in, as she had no white dresses and didn't want to wait to have any made. He could scarcely remember any of it now, just a long bright blur ending in their bed. One image of blinding clarity, present as if it was still happening: he had been terrified, unsure of how to proceed. She wore only her nightdress, just a few layers of lace between his eyes, his hands and the naked flesh of her body.

Her name had been pulled from his lips. "Katrina..." She silenced him with a kiss, daring more than brushing lips. Her tongue was an instrument of bliss that he had never dared dream of.

He almost cried out in shock as her fingers found him, too sure, too deft. She saw the panic in his eyes, sat up, lit the candle beside the bed. "What's the matter?' she whispered.

"You...how did you...have-"

"Oh." she laughed a little, and wrapped the coverlet quilt around her bare shoulders. Pulling back into safe realms, each in their own separate pool of light, together but not one. "Ichabod, you must understand that country life is very different from the way things are here. And our manners are changed accordingly. You see," she went on, stroking his brow, "most of the folk of Sleepy Hollow are blood kin. Even as a child, I knew that there were very few men that I could marry, who were not relations and were of the proper state. I always knew it would be Brom. Everyone knew."

"But Brom is dead. What can-"

"Let me finish," she said, cutting him off. "When you know, when everyone knows, who the man is that you will marry, the rules about intimate contact become different. What I'm trying to say, Ichabod, is that Brom was my first. It was natural; we always regarded one another as married already. It happened when I was sixteen, and old enough to know what it was that I was doing. But I thought you should know."

He eyes were very deep, and he saw traces of fear in them. Fear of rejection? Fear of shame? "Do not worry,' he whispered in to her hair. "As long as I am your last, I am content." His breath passed along the curve of her ear, her neck, and she shivered. He took that as a good sign. "I, however," he quavered, "Am not so experienced. I confess," he said, sitting up and taking hold of her small cold hands, "that I have never lain with a woman before. I'm afraid none would have me, before you."

He saw fire in her face, that warmed and fed but did not consume. She leaned in to his embrace, so much smaller than he that she could tuck herself under his shoulders and be fully enclosed, a precious jewel in a dark setting. She twined round him like a green vine, her legs and fingers and spine tangling him in a net that he did not want to escape. "You're safe," she crooned. "You're with me. And I love you, my darling, I love you."

*

Young Masbath found him, hunched over on the doorstep of his own home. The boy was about to toss out the contents of the dust pail over Ichabod's head before he looked down and saw his master. The bucket clanked and clanged as he set it down. "Sir?"

Ichabod didn't turn his head. "Masbath, why do you stay here?"

The boy peered at him in confusion. "I have nowhere else to go, sir. And you provide for me, and are kind, and Miss Katrina has been teaching me to read. I have no wish to leave you, sir."

"You are a fool to stay, Masbath."

"And why a fool, sir?"

Appearing to change the subject, he patted the space beside him. "Do you think...do you think that Katrina is happy?

Masbath didn't speak at once, and Ichabod darted a quick glance at him. The child's brow was furrowed, his small pinched face full of an intense focus. "Well, sir, I'd say she's about as happy as a lady who's just lost everything can be expected to. You didn't know Master Van Tassel, or you'd understand. He was a good man, sir, and he set the light of day on her."

"Yes."

"But sir-not meaning to make over bold, sir, but you should know that she sets the light of day on you."

Ichabod sighed gustily. "I have never had the care and keeping of another person," he told the boy. "My mother died when I was so very young, and my father...I never had much in the way of playmates to care for. I want to do the right thing by the both of you." He squared his shoulders, steel in the set of his mouth. "You will tell me, young Masbath, if I ever fail in that capacity. Will you not?"

Masbath smiled at him, bright and oddly joyous. "I will, sir, but I don't think I'll be needing to."

*

One morning, a summons to the high court appeared in the morning mail. The document contained no details; Ichabod was not sure whether to be cheered by this or not.

The Burgomaster looked smaller, older, sitting in an armchair in his offices. But his face was no less grim that was his habit in court. Ichabod nervously stepped round the doorjamb, terrified lest his legs should fail him and he should trip or faint.

"Constable Crane," the Burgomaster sighed. "I am removing you from the Beckett case. It will go to trial within this week, but you need not concern yourself with it further."

Ichabod sat down hard, not waiting to be invited. The Burgomaster raised a curving brow, but said nothing. "I...what? Why?"

"Two weeks you have held the responsibility of bringing the criminal who committed these acts to face our justice. Thus far, not one man has been brought in for questioning. Constable, we do not pay you to breathe."

"I...sir, the case is most difficult, but I am sure that given time...my methods are revolutionary and as such untested. I am on my own, as it were, attempting to break new ground. Is that not worth some delay?"

The Burgomaster pinched the bridge of his nose with his forefinger and thumb. "Crane, you may well be correct. But I cannot give you any more time than you have had. I have a duty, Constable, to the people of this city and the villages around it. It is my task to ensure their safety, and to see that the law is carried out."

Ichabod's voice was heated as he pressed his advantage. "Sir, does that safety not include protection for lies, rumour and malice, or the possible mistakes of the constabulary?"

*

She looked up when he came in, surprised to see him so early in the afternoon. 'Ichabod?" she asked. "Is everything all right? Why-"

He cut her off, stepping in to the hall and sweeping her into his arms. She giggled, the sound of her laughter trailing down his fingers like kisses. He realized that he had no heard her laugh like that for a while; he could not tell how long. "Katrina," he breathed. "I cannot stay long-I have to get back to work-but I wanted to let you know that, if you will, I shall be escorting you to the New York theatre this evening. It was my belief," he added, grinning into her bright upturned face, "that women required a certain amount of time to prepare themselves for an outing, and I did not want to take you off your guard."

She kissed him. Looked into his eyes solemnly, and asked, "Why are you doing this?"

Matching her tone, he said, "Because you have been unhappy, and I have not cared for you as I ought. I took you away from friends and kin and brought you to a place where you knew no one but myself. Considering the circumstances, I have quite neglected you. I wanted to make up for it."

"I do understand, Ichabod," she said. "I know that you must do your work, both for my sake and because you care about the righting of the world. I love you for that reason, and not in spite of it."

"I must go. Be ready this evening?"

"Yes." She stood in the doorway and watched until he was quite out of sight. Outside the window snow fell softly and unhurriedly, drifting down in a listless waltz.

*

She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Her blue gown was brighter, darker, than anything he had seen her wear. The silk of it clung about her, whispering wordless promises with every movement of her body. Her yellow hair was piled up in intricate loops, leaving the long curve of her neck and shoulders bare. She looked older, a woman and not a girl. "Do you like it?" she asked, feeling the weight of his gaze.

"Yes."

The play was Shakespeare's Hamlet. Katrina was riveted, at first by the entire concept of theatre, and then by Ophelia. "She knows so much," she whispered into Ichabod's ear, "and yet she's mad. But Hamlet wasn't mad, because he didn't understand the full import of the ghost."

"Hush now," he said. 'Gertrude's speaking." But as the tall actress playing the unfaithful queen began to tell of the willow that grew aslant the brook, Katrina's face went lax. She gasped once, her hands reaching out in clutching claws, and then she slumped in her seat. For a moment, he thought she'd stopped breathing all together.

Paying no heed to the performance, he stood and called for help. His mind was blank; the only thing in it was the cardinal in the cage, and then free, and in the cage again, always spinning round and round.

She neither moved nor spoke until the morning light spattered her counterpane. As it touched her folded hands, she looked up at him with seeing eyes. "Breath on a glass," she said. "Glass shows many things."

She did not speak again, but the sleep that she fell into seemed more natural, more healthful, and his heart began to unclench.

"There's vervain in the kitchen," Masbath told him in a low voice, "and orris, and dried honeysuckle."

Ichabod brushed away the boy's grasping hand. He felt that he could not bear any human touch, or his last shreds of strength would be lost. "Yes? What of it?" he said, brusque with anxiety.

"I know what those herbs are for, sir. She's told me. She was doing a Seeing, Miss Katrina. And mayhap she saw something, maybe that's what this faint is all about."

Masbath's hand came down on his arm again, and Ichabod realized that he'd nearly fallen, his eyes having closed of their own accord. "Why didn't she tell me!" he cried, and Masbath pulled him into a chair, wrapping him in comfort that he knew he didn't deserve. She'd done it for him.

"The only thing you can do, sir," the boy at his elbow said, "is to use the knowledge that she found for you. She paid a great price for it, seemingly. Don't let it go to waste."

*

"I thought you'd changed," she said softly, running flour along the planes of her hands. "And I was wrong."

'What do you mean by that?" The curve of his mouth tightened, prepared for expressions of distaste or affront.

She didn't look up, put her hands together in a loose clasp, punched them down into the center of the dough. Folded it over and did it again. "When you came to Sleepy Hollow, you tried so hard to believe that the world was rational." Her voice was low, almost singsong. "You needed it to be logical. And then when you saw the Hessian, I thought you understood that it had never been so simple. That there were mysteries that could only be accepted, never explained. But I see now that I was wrong. You never felt that way."

"I'm afraid I still don't take your meaning."

She laughed, a mocking little witch-laugh. "Oh Ichabod. It's all right, I'm not going to tell you your faults or any such thing, and you needn't play the whipped child. I know now, that's all. You never gave up on your rational world, just changed the rules a bit. Your rational world is big enough now to hold ghosts and witches, but nothing in your heart has really changed."

He sighed. "Katrina, if I give up on reason there's nothing left but to become a beast. I've seen what happens when men trust overmuch, I see it in every innocent man tortured into confession and every guilty man sentenced over-hard. I cannot, I will not accept that."

"I would never ask you to,' she whispered, trailed a dusty finger along his temple. She would have to clean his suit later, she thought as he pulled her into his lap. It was going to be a right mess. And the bread-it could rise a bit, she supposed, before she went back to kneading. Her mother always said that loaves were better for some time to themselves.

*

At the scene of the murder, Ichabod carefully guided the jet of steam issuing from the converted small brass kettle he'd brought from Katrina's kitchen. It now contained its own heating mechanism, rendering it portable and capable of sustaining output for far longer than conventional means. He would have to remind Masbath to clean the windows in the sitting room-he'd left all sorts of odd marks on them in trying to test the new method.

The room was all out of order, bearing the distinct marks of a struggle. The girl had lived her last moments here, Ichabod was sure of it. A chill crept along his spine at the thought, and he swallowed hard.

The water vapour ghosted along the panes of glass in the disturbed room, revealing as it went the marks of hands, one set smaller and one large, one twisting free and the other restraining. In the outline of the water droplets, Ichabod could see two sets of almost perfect fingerprints. He smiled. It was time to have that database of criminal hands he'd been building put to work. The fingertips of innocent men didn't match those of the guilty. It would be easy to match her hands to the marks on the windowpane, to make the links in the mystery iron-strong. And the dead would rest.

 

 

 


End file.
